Unlocking The Cheat Codes To Geoff Keighley's Game Awards
Unlocking The Cheat Codes To Geoff Keighley's Game Awards
The "hobbyist's hobby" driving the modern GOTY race
On a particular Thursday night in early December for several years now, you will find thousands of gaming's developers, media, content creators, and fans descending upon the Peacock Theater in downtown LA to witness a three-hour long marathon of gaming announcements, performances, and tributes in person. Millions more watch online as everyone waits to see which game from the prior 12 months will be memorialized as the unofficial Game of the Year (GOTY for short).
It's modeled after the Oscars, and creator and host Geoff Keighley has worked hard for a decade now to turn The Game Awards into the annual capstone for a nearly $200 billion global industry with an unusually obsessive fanbase. But it's as much a sporting event as an arts gala, with people as invested in the horse race around who's winning, who's losing, and what those narratives say not just about the companies involved but about the individual identities of the players rooting one way or the other.
Keighley revealed the 2024 nominees for his black tie showcase on Monday and it included the perfect amount of predictable picks, unexpected drama, and low-stakes controversy to sum up the decade-long venture shining a spotlight on the best and worst of gaming culture and the techno-artistic objects with which it's obsessed. Though unlike previous years, he's managed to focus debate more squarely on the games themselves than the often confusing, absurd, and neutered platform upon which they're being celebrated.
Elden Ring's DLC, which most players couldn't even access when it came out, could be this year's GOTY while a snub for Black Myth Wukong would be fresh oxygen for anti-woke online rage-baiters. Metaphor: Refantazio offers a beloved but familiar RPG formula while Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth is wildly ambitious and deeply flawed. Then there's Balatro which people are obsessed with but whose dark patterns people feel kind of icky for loving, while Astro Bot is pure joy but just shy of truly revelatory.
Oli Welsh has been tracking the game awards race this year over at Polygon where he’s senior editor through a new column called "GOTY Watch" that's focused more on the conversation around the games than the games themselves. Before joining Polygon, he spent over a decade at Eurogamer. Prior to that, he reviewed games for Edge Magazine as a freelancer. He said his first formative sense of a game being important for the medium was probably The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in 1998. Early memories of feeling a duty to advocate for the significance of particular releases included 2005’s Ōkami and 2006’s Shadow of the Colossus.
Similarly monumental releases Halo 3 and Super Mario Odyssey followed in 2007 which Edge both gave 10/10 scores to, a much bigger deal back in the day than an Oscars-like GOTY race. (“I think they're both justified, but some Edge people think that's the beginning of the end. If we give out two 10s in a month it can't possibly be right.”) It wasn’t until the late aughts and early 2010s that the GOTY moniker gain more purchase on the imaginations of fans and critics.
Everything in the online age has a meta, including game of the year discussions. So I sat down with Welsh recently (prior to the nominees being announced) to pick his brain about why the GOTY competition is interesting, the unspoken rules of how it plays out, and what its significance says about the culture around gaming.
For starters, there’s a clear GOTY type, at least when it comes to Keighley’s awards show, which is voted on by media and content creators from around the globe, but with a slight emphasis on English speaking critics in the U.S. and UK. (As Keighley is at great pains to point out every year, he’s not involved in the voting at all). If a studio were designing a something from scratch to win the Best Game category, what would Welsh recommend they make based on his recent survey of past Game Awards ceremonies?
“I would say that it needs to have strong narrative elements, so it should be quite story forward, ideally, performance should be quite a big part of it. So you want to have it be fully voiced, maybe even motion capture performance, high production values…like AAA narrative-led action adventures or RPGs,” he said. “I've analyzed the nominees between the genre categories and Game of the Year, and you nearly always have an overlap of four out of the six Game of the Year nominees are in the action adventure category. The overlap with RPG is smaller, but they are, if anything, more likely to win if nominated.”
Welsh pointed to exceptions that prove the rule like Overwatch winning in 2016, a rare coup for a competitive multiplayer game with no campaign, and It Takes Two, a co-op indie adventure that benefited from a series of pandemic-era delays. “The Last of Us Part II won the Game the Year award where it was virtually every site awarded its Game of the Year to Hades,” he said of 2020.
“But Hades as an indie game, and as an action game, was quite far outside the comfort zone for Game of the Year nominees and winners, and it didn't manage to break through on that occasion. Whereas The Last of Us Part II has the performance element, it’s got very emotive performance capture, it's very cinematic, and it's got very ostentatiously serious themes to its storytelling as well, all of which tend to go down well with the jury.”
Welsh also thinks the march of technology that underpins the economics around games contributes to an inherent valuing of big-budget spectacle above pure game design. “It's very deeply embedded in the gaming community, this idea that the shiniest, most ambitious, most technically accomplished stuff is is the best,” he said.
“And I note as well that if you look at the Game Awards’ language around it, they always say technical and artistic achievement. Technical is always in there whereas in the Oscars, you tend to talk about the above the line and below the line categories. Above the line is director, actor, screenplay, below the line is production design, score, cinematography—there's kind of an upstairs, downstairs thing in movies with the art and with the craft. In the Game Awards, they put them both together at the same time.”
Deeper than the event’s bias toward expensive blockbusters—there are three separate categories for indie games to make up for the fact that they are rarely nominated, let alone win—is the priority critics seem to perennially give to story-driven games over system-driven ones. Management sims and strategy games, which often thrive on Steam in terms of both sales and player reception, but lack the gravitas associated with a season of HBO prestige TV, rarely get a mention.
“Geoff makes no secret of the fact that his his motivation with the Game Awards is he wants video games to have a moment in the calendar and a celebration that is as important as the Oscars or the Grammys or the Emmys, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that at all,” Welsh said. “But I think that motivation comes from the striving that the video game medium continually has to compare itself, or the industry continually has to compare itself, to those other media.”
He continued:
The actual biggest games in the world are not God of War, they're League of Legends. They are deeply systemic games, or social games, or like Fortnite, that are operating in a in a completely different sphere. Those games have their own little corners within the Game Awards where they can be celebrated, but they're never going to be a Game of the Year.
Another part of that is just that this is just an incredibly diverse medium, right? The gulf between, I don't know, a frat boy comedy movie and the highest minded Oscar contender or the weirdest art house film is still much smaller than the gulf between a mobile puzzle game, an online MMO, and a fancy console action-adventure.
Those are barely the same thing at all, but we still lump them under this same umbrella. So I've got a lot of sympathy as well for both Geoff and his organization and all of us in the in the gaming community trying to make sense of all this. We we're calling video games one thing, which they are patently not. I think that’s where that inferiority complex tends to make us think, well, this culture ascribes these other things value, so the parts of gaming that are most like those other things must be the parts of gaming that have the most value. But I don't think that's true.
GOTY Watch Q&A Cont.
Dead Game: What’s the most exciting category this year?
Oli Welsh: I think almost any year that indie is the most exciting category. I do think it's super exciting this year because you've got three or four games that have over 90 Metacritic scores…plus games that are widely played and have great reputations, UFO 50, Animal Well, Balatro, and many other strong contenders as well—Arco, Lorelai and the Laser—it's always an exciting category, but I think it's a really exciting category this year.
I think Best Ongoing Game one of the most fascinating categories. The Game Awards is designed to reward live service games and so far it's been working as intended, perhaps a little bit too well, in that there's been maybe 10 games just swapping those five nominations for Best Ongoing Game over the over in the years that it's been in operation. Fortnite's been nominated every year for six years in a row now…there's potential for all sorts of newcomers in that award as well, such as Diablo IV, Stardew Valley with a 1.6 update—that could be really interesting.
Dead Game: Who are your frontrunners and dark horses?
Oli Welsh: I would say Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth. I initially had it at the top of my picks. This is right in the core of where Game Awards voting resides. A 92 Metacritic, story-led RPG, handsome production values, but I think that its chances have effectively been killed by Metaphor Refantazio, which is a much more niche and less Game Awards-y game, but in a very similar genre and [with] an even better critical reputation. And I think the RPG vote is going to be split between those two and I think Final Fantasy VII is the one that's probably going to come off worse out of it [Editor’s note: Rebirth’s chances were buoyed this week thanks to its seven total nominations, tied with Astro Bot for the most]
Dead Game: What’s a past game that was snubbed at the time but deserved a GOTY nod?
Oli Welsh: Invisible, Inc by Klei Entertainment…it's basically a cyber punk heist tactics game, and it's just absolutely marvelous. It's procedurally generated, but it never fails to construct really exciting, really tense scenarios…it's the true potential for organic storytelling within games where the story is not written. It’s constructed by the game systems and the player working together to create fun, exciting scenarios.
Dead Game: Would you want Keighley to reveal the Game Awards popular vote?
Oli Welsh: It probably would lose its mystique. You don't want to reveal too much of these things. Obviously, as a journalist, I want all of the info, but if I put myself in Geoff’s place, no, you probably do want to keep it a little bit mysterious. I would love to know rankings within each category and within Game of the Year. That's the data that I would really love to have, and I think the people would really, really love to have as well.
Dead Game: Why even bother covering the GOTY race to begin with?
Oli Welsh: It was just something that we thought would be fun to do, to engage in the kind of punditry that you see around those other media, and not just fun, but useful in a way, because the conversation around it is all about picking out the things that are resonating with people—the things that are resonating with with the industry, with the creative community, with critics—and just like having a sustained conversation about the best games of each year, and the ones that are most important, and that there's a whole entire industry around this…
…I'd say it's all part of elevating the medium and part of elevating the medium is saying, ‘This is nonsense, I just want to talk about Arco,’ and part of elevating the medium is saying, ‘Why does, I don't know, why is Dragon Age far more likely to get nominated for a Game of the Year award than Arco?' What are the systems that support that?’ We can clarify that for people and maybe it will will change some thinking, we will change some mind.
[From a follow-up email after the nominees were announced]: Today we've seen massive traffic to our nominations coverage, no doubt due to the authority we've built up on The Game Awards and GOTY over the months. That's nice for us, but the really amazing thing is seeing people click through (in VERY significant numbers) from the nominations post to our (arts-led) reviews of games like Balatro, Metaphor, and Neva—games that they might not otherwise know about, and that they probably didn't discover when we recommended them first time around. This is kind of the best-case scenario of what awards and awards coverage can do—expand the horizons of a larger audience, and bring more good games to the fore.
Final thoughts and predictions
The more ridiculous it gets trying to compare hundreds of disparate games against one another to determine the best ones, the more I appreciate having a touch point in the culture for people to celebrate, rage, and debate what’s going on. I don’t know if it meaningfully changes anything or adds to anyone’s understanding of games as art, as technology, or as complex economic arrangements.
I’m sure it’s at least momentarily affirming for the winners who spent the last year or six hunched over a computer full of doubt and self-loathing to see their work, collaborative or solo, vindicated in some way beyond a Steam review, article headline, or quarterly earnings report.
The Game Awards has always had a complex relationship with sponsors, who have in the past included everything from shaving razors to Grubhub. Many of the trailers featured during the show are also sponsored, either as direct ad-buys or as placement purchases for news-making reveals. This year Keighley announced that Amazon is the “exclusive retail partner” for the show.
There will be special deals for those watching live who are Prime subscribers, presumably on everything from accessories and gear to the games themselves. Maybe every time an award goes to Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth, a game about saving the planet from an exploitative mega corp, fans will be able to buy the game at a discount from the real life exploitative mega corp currently helping to destroy the planet. If the Oscars are primarily a vehicle for gawking at celebrities from the sidelines, the Game Awards has always been first and foremost about selling stuff, and calling out bad actors, corporate or otherwise, is bad for business, at least as it’s currently constructed.
Here are my own predictions for the Game Awards 2024. First, the event will run too long. The musical performances of the songs will be excellent. There will be at least two celebrity cameos that embarrassingly cringe and at least one that’s awkward but still charming. Hideo Kojima will spend the length of three people’s acceptance speeches talking about how he loves movies and scanning people, and has partnered with another major company on a vague and far off project about pushing the boundaries of interactive storytelling. There will be at least one major tease—Kingdom Hearts 4, a new IP out of Sony Santa Monica—that fans come away from the event remembering fondly and speculating about and clinging to for sustenance throughout the cold winter back log slog.
Someone will collect an award and be on the verge of saying something very profound before they are knocked off mental balance by the hurry up music and shuffled off stage moments later. The theater cameras will get at least one shot of Phil Spencer in the audience looking impatient and exhausted. Josef Fares will banter with Keighley but still not do the one thing everyone is there to watch him do which is turn to the camera and say a naughty word.
Astro Bot will win GOTY because Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth and Metaphor: Refantazio will split the 100 hour RPG sicko vote and only like 12 people actually finished Shadow of the Erdtree. Balatro, beloved as it is, just won’t have the juice to push critics to memorialize its clever RNG craftmanship. But it will win Best Independent game of the year, Animal Well will take home the Debut Indie award, and Hellblade 2 will nab the Games for Impact accolade. Everyone will come away feeling a little cheated and swear off the Game Awards forever until next November rolls around.